Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay is an Associate Professor of Performing Arts and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics in the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage at the University of Milan. Ertuğ’s primary research areas include minoritarian theatre cultures, feminist and queer media, performance, and literature, theories of performance and performativity, critical archival studies, and the cultural history of Turkey. He currently serves as the principal investigator of three research projects: Staging National Abjection: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas (European Research Council Starting Grant); Negotiating Abjection: Performance and Politics Among Turkey’s Diasporas in Lombardy (ERC Attractiveness Grant, Cariplo Foundation); and Archives of Abjection: Minoritarian Cultural Production in Turkey and Its Diasporas (Young Researchers Grant, Next Generation EU Program and the Ministry of Universities and Research, Italy).

He has co-edited special issues on Turkey and its diasporas for Comparative Drama and on archives and popular culture for Archives and Records and The Journal of Popular Culture as well as a dossier on Ottoman and Turkish theatre historiography for Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Theatre Journal, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Sexualities, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Women’s History, Performance Research, Comparative Drama, Youth Theatre Journal, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Archival Science, and Radical History Review. Ertuğ is also a dramatic translator, dramaturg, and playwright. Essays on his theatre work appeared in European Stages and Theatre Research International

Ayse Çağlar is a sociologist and an anthropologist. She is a University Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna and is a permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. She held several visiting professorships in different European universities and fellowships such as Jean Monnet (EUI, Florence), Minerva (Max Planck, Göttingen) and at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School, Swedish Collegium. She is a member of Academia Europaea. She has been co-directing the research platforms “Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration” at the IWM as well as the “Challenges of Urban Futures: Governing the Complexities in European Cities”, at the University of Vienna.

Çağlar’s work and publications focused on the interfaces of migration, urban restructuring, dispossession, displacement, confined labor, extractivism, and the transformations of statehood and the governance of cities especially. Most of her work is comparative and there is a special emphasis on disempowered cities and on wars. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants (Cornell University Press, 2010); Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration (Duke University Press, 2018); Urbaner Protest. Revolte in der neoliberalen Stadt (Passagen Verlag, 2019); Displacements and Dispossessions (2020); Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (Albany: SUNY Press (2024).

Tracy C. Davis (Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Northwestern University, USA) specializes in the historiography and methodologies of theatre and performance research, 19^th-century theatre history, economics and business history of theatre, performance theory, gender and theatre, museum studies, and Cold War studies. She serves on the Executive Committee of IFTR and is a Past President of ASTR. She is the recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, Humboldt Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and SSHRC, and has published a dozen books and over 100 articles in journals dedicated to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She is working on two monographs: a study of St. George and the Dragon performances and a book that will launch the titular series “Critical Media Histories.”

Recent publications include Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform, The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies (coedited with Paul Rae), The Routledge Handbook to Theatre and Performance Historiography (coedited with Peter Marx), and Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book (co-edited with Stefka Mihaylova). A seasoned research mentor, she has provided trainings across the globe for faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs to improve mentoring skills, and is co-PI on two National Science Foundation grants to enhance mentoring and inclusivity in the geosciences.

Professor Milija Gluhovic is Head of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.  His research is in the area of modern and contemporary theatre and performance with published work in the areas of memory studies and psychoanalysis; discourses of European identity, migrations and human rights; religion, secularity, and politics; and international performance research and pedagogy. His work has been published in Modern Drama, Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Research in Drama Education, New Polish Perspectives, and Teatron, among other journals.  His books include A Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory (Bloomsbury, 2020), Performing European Memories:Trauma, Ethics, Politics (Palgrave, 2013) and co-edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (OUP, 2021), International Performance Research Pedagogies: The Unconditional Discipline?  (Palgrave, 2018), Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation and Politics (Palgrave, 2017), and Performing the 'New' Europe: Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (Palgrave, 2013). Currently he leads a EUTOPIA Connected Community ‘Thinking through the Silk Road. Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Mobilities,’ an innovative framework for the study of cultural productions, visual arts and performances, cultural heritage, and geocultural politics, emergent in the broad context of old and new Silk Roads. He serves as an elected member of the IFTR Executive Committee and as a co-opted member of the EASTAP Executive Committee. He is also the Editor in Chief of Brill’s ‘Themes in Theatre’ book series and serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Theatre and Performance.

Dr. Allen J. Kuharski is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia, where he taught directing, theater history, and performance theory for 32 years.  Prominent among his former students are the founders of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theater Company, which is celebrating its 30^th anniversary in 2025.  Since 2012, he has also taught part-time in the MFA Program in Devised Performance at the Pig Iron School/Rowen University (Philadelphia/Glassboro, New Jersey).  Since 2022, he has taught annually in Beijing and Shanghai, China.  Originally trained as a set designer, he has also worked as a director, performance curator, dramaturge, translator, editor, and critic. 

He founded and for 20 years chaired the Department of Theater at Swarthmore.  Since 1981, Kuharski has regularly studied, researched, and worked in Poland, where he was twice a Fulbright Scholar in theater and recently directed a devised movement theater piece titled Bezkresy (Unbounded) with graduating MFA students in the Dance Theatre Department of the Karol Szymanowski School of Music in Katowice.  At the University of California at Berkeley, Kuharski wrote the first dissertation in any language devoted to the theatrical work of the modern Polish playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz.  He co-founded and co-directed Swarthmore’s study-abroad programs in theater and dance in Poland (1999-2008). 

Kuharski is an internationally-published scholar and critic, best known for his work related to Polish theater and drama and contemporary director’s theater (Lupa, Grotowski, Kantor, Szajna, Chaikin, Mnouchkine, Ronconi, Warlikowski, Zadara).  He has given lectures in major universities across the US and in ten foreign countries.  His translations of stage works by Gombrowicz, Ionesco, and Różewicz have been widely performed in the United States and other countries. Kuharski is a co-editor of the 15-volume Witold Gombrowicz: Pisma Zebrane (Witold Gombrowicz: Collected Writings) published by Wydawnicto Literackie in Kraków. 

Michael McKinnie is Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses primarily on theatre’s relationship with political economy and its role in urban development, as well as on theatre as a social institution embedded in political and economic relations, and how this plays out offstage as much as onstage. Michael is the author of Theatre in Market Economies (2021) and City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City (2007), which was awarded the Ann Saddlemyer Award by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and recently contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 (2024) and The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies (2024). Whilst his first book focused on the relationship between theatre and urban development in Toronto since the 1960s, he has written extensively about theatre in London, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. 

He is also the editor of Space and the Geographies of Theatre. He studied Drama (BA) and English (MA) in Canada, and worked in Toronto in new play development before moving to the United States to complete his PhD in the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University, where he wrote his thesis under the supervision of Professor Tracy C. Davis. He joined Queen Mary in 2006, having previously worked at the University of Birmingham and Queen’s University Belfast.

Sharon Zukin is an urban sociologist whose work documents how culture and capital shape contemporary cities, from gentrified global enclaves to innovation districts. Her book Loft Living (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) is the classic account of SoHo’s postindustrial transformation, a critical approach that extends through Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Naked City (winner of the Jane Jacobs Award for Urban Communication), and The Innovation Complex, as well as After the Trade Center (edited with Michael Sorkin) and Global Cities, Local Streets (edited with Philip Kasinitz and Xiangming Chen). Her books have been translated into nine other languages. Zukin is professor emerita of sociology and of earth and environmental sciences at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York and has been a visiting professor at universities in Amsterdam, Sydney, and Shanghai. 

 https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/sharon-zukin